Faurisson generated much controversy with several articles published in the Journal of Historical Review and elsewhere, and by letters to French newspapers, especially Le Monde, which contradicted the history of the Holocaust by denying the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps, the systematic killing of European Jews using gas during the Second World War, and the authenticity of The Diary of Anne Frank.

[4] He studied French, Latin and Greek literature (Lettres classiques), and passed the agrégation (the highest competitive examination to qualify to be a secondary school teacher) in 1956.

In Vichy, as a young teacher, he gained attention when he published an interpretation of Rimbaud's Sonnet des voyelles as an erotic text.

Around 1960, he developed political sympathies for the colonialist cause in Algeria (the Algérie française movement), and was arrested in the belief he was a member of the "OAS", a terrorist organisation.

The president of the jury, Jacques Robichez, declared: "Finally, I point out […] to the candidate that the method of reading the text as it is written; systematically ignoring the context, not taking into account the historical environment reflected by the language, is an unsustainable bias".

In 1974, Faurisson contacted Yad Vashem with a lengthy letter detailing a variety of arguments which he claimed demonstrated that there had been no genocide of Jews during World War II.

[7] He twice testified in defense of Canadian-German Holocaust denier and Neo-Nazi Ernst Zündel, and his testimony has been associated with laying the groundwork for the "Leuchter Report", an influential Holocaust-denial publication.

Noting that he had described the Holocaust as "the most fantastic outburst of collective insanity in human history", Chomsky argued that his views were "diametrically opposed" to those of Faurisson on the subject.

[3][15] Faurisson was fined by a French court in 1983, for having declared that "Hitler never ordered nor permitted that anyone be killed by reason of his race or religion.

[20] In December 2006, Faurisson gave a speech at the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust, which was sponsored by the government of Iran.